conversations on live art | borders | crossings

January 14, 2019April 1, 2019

performingborders | LIVE 2019

performingborders and Foreign Actions Productions present

performingborders | LIVE

From February until late June 2019, we present a programme of events that bring outside of the online realm urgent conversations and extraordinary artistic practices happening within the UK experimental live art sector around notions of cultural, juridical, racial, gendered, class, physical, and everyday borders.

Curated by Alessandra Cianetti and Xavier de Sousa, performingborders | LIVE draws from the curatorial research platform ‘performingborders. conversations on live art | crossings | europe’ that since 2016 has been gathering original interviews, writings and experimental responses from live artists, academics and art professionals on physical and conceptual borders within an increasingly shared feeling of uncertainty. As an attempt to make sense of an ever-developing present that hugely impacts on minority and oppressed communities, performingborders | LIVE brings those discussions into venues in Manchester, Brighton, London and Nogales (US/Mexico border wall) to widen the conversation and create a broader inclusive discussion that will also be freely accessible online.

As part of the programme two commissions for original performance to camera will be created by the Istanbul Queer Art Collective and artist Tara Fatehi Irani and shown at the Beyond the Wall / Más Allá del Muro Festival in Nogales at the Mexico/US border wall (May 2019), and previewed in London for the at the performingborders | LIVE final event ‘Curating Borderless Spaces’ at the Live Art Development Agency on 22nd June 2019.

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To widening the discussion around borders and include uncharted perspectives, performingborders | LIVE invites proposals for two digital conversations on Live Art and borders. The international live art community is invited to bring their own perspective into the word ‘border’ and what it means in their practice and lived experience. The two final digital pieces will be published on both the performingborders and the Live Art Development Agency websites as a free to access resources.

Free movement workshops about systemic racial, gender and xenophobic oppression and its impact on the body will be held by Camille Barton/The Collective Liberation Project. Embodied Movement for Social Change workshop uses ‘somatic exercises and dance to explore how oppression is rooted in the body and how we can shift its hold on our lives using mindful attention and movement’ and will be freely accessible in both Brighton (21 March 2019, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts) and London (6 July 2019, Deptford Lounge).

Everyone is welcome! performingborders | LIVE welcomes people whose practice, research and life have been shaped by experiences of migration and borders.

In the Embodied Social Change workshop by Camille Barton, dance, somatics and mindfulness are used to explore how oppression is rooted in the body and how we can shift its hold on our lives using mindful attention and movement. The work is intended to generate new approaches to activism that focus on the body, as well as the mind. After all, systems of power and oppression are reproduced by our bodies on a daily basis.

Anti-Cool, On Returning, 2017 (still from video)

Wed 24 April 2019 | 7.00pm-9.00pm| performingborders | LIVE | London
Toynbee Studios
A conversation between interdisciplinary artist Anti-Cool and curators osborn&møller (UK/Denmark), presenting the UK premiere of Anti-Cool’s three-screen video installation On Returning, which explores the history of several British families and couples, separated and disrupted by current immigration policies.

Since the financial requirement was introduced in 2012 for those with family members from outside of the EU countries, 20,000 families who cannot meet the threshold have been facing separation from their family members. Many of them can only speak to their children on Skype. Using raw and often blunt interview footage of participants who are in the middle of such disruptions, On Returning investigates their true feelings about borders, human rights and families. Although highly prevalent in today’s political climate, such stories are still unknown by the majority of the people in the UK. While investigating the difficult issues of immigration the work also uses experimental visual elements of the British landscape and physical/performative actions to explore the highly emotive side of the subject matter.

Sun 5 May 2019 | performingborders | LIVE | US/Mexico border wall
Nogales Arizona/Sonora
performingborders | LIVE conversations and performance to camera commissions will be presented as part of the second edition of the Más Allá del Muro / Beyond the Wall Festival.

Más Allá del Muro / Beyond the Wall, which is run by a coalition of local and international artists, aims to showcase authentic, diverse, local perspectives on life at the US/Mexico border through local artists and youth. We know there is more to life at the border than the wall: our work offers locals a chance to celebrate and reconsider the narratives around local life, and non-locals an invitation to connect to authentic local stories and reconsider their perspective on life at the border. In 2019, we are hosting a binational pen pal program with high school students, and hosting the 2nd annual Beyond the Wall Festival, a binational art and culture festival in Nogales AZ/SON, where the wall bisects the city. The festival centerpiece is a performance of 15-foot tall puppets of children created with local youth; the puppets come together at the wall, reframing it as an object of play.

Human Chain, 2016. Image by Lucia Palmero

22 June 2019 | Final event: Curating Borderless Spaces| London
Live Art Development Agency, Free, more information coming soon.
Join performingborders | LIVE final event, Curating Borderless Spaces. A day of talks, conversations, actions, sharing at/across/against borders. The event will be the London premiere of the new performingborders | LIVE performance to camera commissions by Istanbul Queer Art Collective and Tara Fatehi Irani & will present the two selected digital conversations on Live Art and borders. Artist and writer Season Butler will respond live to the event’s contributions, with the outcomes being shared on our website.